The course will be taught online over 3 full consecutive weekdays (0900 – 1515), with a mixture of live interactive lectures, seminars, and group work. The course is structured to introduce key concepts and then build on that foundation, and so participation in all sessions is necessary in order to benefit fully.

By the end of the course participants should be able to:

1. understand the development of empirical bioethics;
2. critically engage with key challenges involved in undertaking empirical bioethics research;
3. critically engage with key theoretical debates in empirical bioethics and understand their significance;
4. demonstrate awareness and understanding of a range of empirical bioethics methods and methodologies; and
5. apply critical methodological insight to their own work.

This course is intended as an introduction for anyone (at any career stage) who is beginning to use, or just wants to know more about, empirical bioethics and its methods.

This course will cover:

1. the rationale behind empirical bioethics;
2. structuring and planning an empirical bioethics research project;
3. literature reviews in empirical bioethics;
4. dialogical and consultative methods in empirical bioethics;
5. qualitative data collection in empirical bioethics;
6. qualitative data analysis in empirical bioethics; and
7. standards of practice in empirical bioethics.

The course director and lead tutor, Professor Jonathan Ives, has been working in empirical bioethics for nearly 20 years, and is established as one of the leading figures internationally in the field. He led a European consensus group on standards of practice in empirical bioethics, is lead editor of the CUP’s 'Empirical Bioethics: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives’, and is lead editor for the newly commissioned Routledge Handbook of Empirical Bioethics. He is an experienced educator, and has provided training and teaching internationally.

Other tutors will be drawn from the Centre for Ethics in Medicine, and have extensive experience in empirical bioethics research, including Professor Richard Huxtable and Dr Giles Birchley.

To make sure the course is suitable for you and you will benefit from attending, please ensure you meet the following prerequisites before booking:

Before booking this course, please make sure you read the information provided above about the target audience and prerequisites. It is important that you have access to the relevant IT resources needed for the course and meet the knowledge prerequisites to ensure you can get the most from the course.

Bookings are taken via our online booking system, for which you must register an account. To check if you are eligible for free or discounted courses please see our fees and voucher packs page. All bookings are subject to our terms & conditions, which can be read in full here.

For help and support with booking a course refer to our booking information page, FAQs or feel free to contact us directly. For available payment options please see: How to pay your short course fees.

Participants are granted access to our virtual learning platform (Blackboard) 1 to 2 weeks in advance of the course. This allows time for any pre-course work to be completed and to familiarise with the platform.

To gain the most from the course, we recommend that you attend in full and participate in all interactive components. We endeavour to record all live lecture sessions and upload these to the online learning environment within 24 hours. This allows course participants to review these sessions at leisure and revisit them multiple times. Please note that we do not record breakout sessions.

All course participants retain access to the online learning materials and recordings for 3 months after the course. 

University of Bristol staff and postgraduate students who do not wish to attend the full course may instead register for access to the 'Materials & Recordings' version of this course: Further information and bookings.

100% of attendees recommend this course*.
*Attendee feedback from 2024.

Here is a sample of feedback from the last run of the course:

"Good balance of taught and collaborative sessions. Great to have three faculty members present for group work and discussions.  Jon made the presentations engaging and always stopped for questions and clarification when needed" – course feedback, March 2024

"By the end of the course it felt like there was a good forum for questions and I learnt from the questions that others asked" – course feedback, March 2024

"This course was a delight. It ran smoothly and was a great introduction all of us new to the concept of Empirical Bioethics" – course feedback, March 2024

"It was a great way to grasp the concept and maybe have a thought of how it could be incorporated into future projects of my discipline" – course feedback, March 2024